unforum

[JAL13]

Do I dare say? Another 7 months hiatus?

[MDHDZN]

[Marble Hornets]

I just expect answers, or at the very least an entry that changes things up. I enjoyed the Jessica entry because it filled in a time gap with interesting plot. I'm sick of the jay/hoody stalking someone, leading to a confrontation that leads to someone either getting slendernapped or running away with no leads, to progress the story.

There needs to be some resolve to at least one of the character's arcs at this point. If Jay is truly dead, his arc is done, but ultimately would be a throwaway character as he accomplished NOTHING in the past 4 years. All the series has been doing is taking one step forward and two steps back. They find clues, go on the hunt, and end up back at square one with no leads and no answers. It comes off as they don't know how to answer certain things/don't have the answers to many things, so they are saving them all for the end, just stringing people along by dangling the answers above their head.

Sure they're great at directing, but they are not great at writing a story that has decent pacing. Not as of recent, at least. Season 2 was phenomenal. But too many s3 entries are buildups to following entries where ultimately nothing happens that matters in the grand scheme of things. Jay was no better off in entry 80 than he was in season 1. He has none of the answers he has been looking for for years. All he found out was that Tim was probably involved with the operator, big deal. We concluded that in entry 35. Alex's turn was a great plot twist that nobody saw coming, but only repetition has come out of that. We still don't know his motives or intentions.

It's not about the end, it's about the ride there. Saving all the answers for the very end is poor storytelling. Giving us more content that doesn't actually conclude in any kind of resolve is poor storytelling. If this was a TV show it would have been cancelled by now, despite how many people on this site enjoy it. I still like the series, but it's gone downhill. The average person would not have watched this long mainly due to the lack of answers.

Point is, we don't know much more than we did in season 1. We have seen some cool stuff along the way, but no longer does the appearance of the operator and a subsequent "taking" of a person interest me if the only big reveal in the series is going to be finding those people.


At this point we should have hoody's identity, or at the very least his motivations told to us in a clear manner. He should be teaming up with Tim, or actually taking alex captive and getting answers out of him. I will cringe if we just get more entries of hoody messing with tim, alex trying to kill them both, or tim getting taken by the operator. We've seen all that far too many times.


Look, I applaud them for finding awesome environments, creating good characters with good character development (most notably Tim), and having the characters use rational thinking/putting the characters in reasonable realistic situations. I don't hate everything about the series. I just hate the repetition in plot/lack of progression in the overall story.

[DHawk314]

I don't really agree though that we don't have anymore answers than we did at the beginning. At the beginning a big question was is Alex alive, and it was important, because he'd just mysteriously disappeared after months of being slenderstalked. Where did he go? Entry #26 sorta showed he'd gone to be with Amy, but that was only really expanded on in Entry #70 where we see he went there to be with her and probably also to escape the Operator. He wasn't going around being murderer Alex, stalked by the Operator and eventually getting rid of Amy after 3+ years, he really escaped for a while, and compared to what we knew at the beginning of the series that's a big revelation.

And we've learned tons about Tim. The fact he doesn't remember being Masky and it's just a state he sorta enters is a huge revelation we had no clue of in Season 2, the fact he was followed by the Operator since he was a child and probably started everything is a huge revelation. We knew none of this shit in Season 2. We had no clue.

Ya want more mysteries? Entry #22. Alex says everyone is gone, Jay, Tim, Brian, Seth, Sarah. But we knew Jay and Tim were alive. We've learned this meant entries 71 and 56/57 respectively. That was something people wondered about for years and now we know it. And speaking of Brian, where he'd gone was a mystery since Entry #15 where Tim said he was gone and Entry #16 which had his creepy abandoned house. Entry #51 shows us what happened to Brian, or at the very least what led to his disappearance.

Or how about the fact that we know what happened to Jessica? That's a huge deal. I understand a lot of the Alex/Operator disappearance entries leave it ambiguous what actually happened to the people, but you have to understand as someone who was actually part of the fandom when we wondered what happened to these people, we have way more information, because back then it was just a big ????. I understand a lot of this information is kind of taken for granted as being obvious retrospectively, but to say Jay wasn't farther in Entry #80 than he was in Season 1 is preposterous.

That's kinda the issue with people bringing up this complaint. Marble Hornets reveals information all the time. Entry #60.5 confirmed Tim had been stalked since childhood, but when it came out everyone just complained "Yeah they hadn't technically revealed that but everyone already figured it out." Ya true, but ya know what? Nobody guessed that Tim had been stalked since childhood in say, Entry #54. And it wasn't confirmed until 60.5. So somewhere along the way we got the info. It's because it was parsed out to us slowly. That's how the Marble Hornets plot works. You don't know something, but 5 entries later you suddenly do, but it doesn't feel like a reveal cause there's so much foreshadowing.

And to me that's good writing. To me we know infinitely more than we did at the beginning about what's been happening, it just happened to smoothly that people didn't notice. The problem with this complaint is that every single entry, people expect the next one to be "Really big" by which they mean a bunch of questions will be answered with some long exposition bullshit and it'll be a really climatic and intense "Big reveal." Marble Hornets does not have big reveals. It never has. People complained there were no questions answered back in Season 2 even after Entry #35. Ya know why? Because people said they "Already knew Tim was Masky".

Because that is how the plot goes in Marble Hornets. By the time something is revealed you've already guessed it because it's been forshadowed and to me that's good, because as I mentioned earlier, but sudden plot twists are stupid novelties. The reason Alex being evil works isn't because it's a big sudden plot twist, it's because the entirety of Season 2 builds up to it and by the time Alex kills that guy you're like "Oh yeah duh." But if you said "Alex kills a guy" to someone who'd only seen Season 1, their brain would explode. So the impact works, at least for me. But if you don't like that kind of plot then I fully understand disliking Marble Hornets. Just don't act like that somehow makes it "Objectively badly written" or say it's "Definitely gone down hill" because to me it's doing what it's always been doing, and it's great!

[Serum]

tldr

[Marble Hornets]

i don't care if you agree or not dhawk. i was asked for my opinion and i gave it. just like my opinion isn't a fact, neither is yours. what may be good storytelling to you may be poor storytelling to someone else who holds things to a higher standard.

and serum, i know you're using faux-trolling techniques to try to annoy me but it won't work. you've revealed enough pitiful things about your personal life that nothing you say would get under my skin

[Geneaux486]

I, also, am anticipating things, including a new entry of Marble Hornets!

[Serum]

[slendydreaming]

Just jumping into the convo to say that Marble Hornets kind of reminds me of LOST, which used to be one of my favorite TV shows, in spite of the fact that we got answers sometimes, and often it would take forever to get those answers. Yet, I watched as many episodes as I could, drinking in every available clue, and waiting anxiously for the next one! Marble Hornets is the same way, you never know what's going to happen and to me, that makes for an interesting story.

[DHawk314]

[Sha Noran]

You guys are going to get this thread locked again, lol. I dunno why you're trolling here Serum when you stated that you wanted this thread.

And most people think their own opinions are better or more well informed than other people's... That's why they have the opinion, lol.

Inb4

[TheOperator]

Let's stop arguing, as I do not want this thread locked.

How many people expect a Tim-vision college entry next? It'd make sense, since they didn't seem to shoot anything over the holiday period but if it's mostly just editing to do on pre-shot footage, the entry could still come out in less than a month since #80. And a more suspenseful entry to bridge the gap between "OMG JAY'S GONE" and possible decisive Hoody confrontation would make sense.

[JAL13]

[Serum]

[paulisdead18]